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Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook
Nrbelex writes to mention The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft has beat out Google and Yahoo for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. The investment will cost Microsoft $240 million valuing the total site at somewhere around $15 billion. "The astronomical valuation for Facebook is primarily evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the Facebook deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been attempting to match and in some cases block Google's plans, even if that effort is costly."
... a stake in the face, I suppose.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Can I be the first?
....because they're in the middle of a pissing match with Google. Are they competing for distance or accuracy?Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Actually I blame it on bad Bistromathics, someone took one too many toothpicks from the bowl by the register and there's an extra mustard stain on the tablecloth.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...the wooden vampire-impaling kind of stake? Because if so, I think Microsoft's got it all backwards.
The past couple of days, I've been listening to my co-worker talk about hitting the wrong button and 'hugging' a large group of people. Not only is he freaking out that only the men have returned his 'hug', he is trying to figure out how tell these people that he did not mean it without alienating them.
Who needs soap operas?
Based on the giant upgrade to IE7 suggestion that started popping up every time you log in, I'd thought this had already happened.
Hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about. When have they ever worried about accuracy in anything they did?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I have a plan.
Seeing this level of wisdom, after painstaking, conservative estimates of revenues and dividends were calculated to come up with this value of $15 billion, which would in the "quaint, old-fashioned" world of people who actually built companies to feed their families and those of their workers be requiring something like a billion of yearly revenue and something like $10 billion in assets, I came to the conclusion that we Slashdotters too can take advantage of this insanity.
Here is what we should do: Each of us starts a corporation, with names like "IgnoramusMaximus' Megacorp Consolidated on the Internet!" (that last bit is important for the "traditional" investors) and then we "sell" to each other our "stakes" in these wonders of modern enterpreneurship for, say, conservatively, 20 million US dollars (or Euros) a share, with the price being "paid" in our equally valuable shares of the other Slashdotter's corporations. If we all say our stuff is worth beeeeeelions, who is to say otherwise! After all, we got web sites and email for these corps!!!
Next thing you know, our shares can be traded on NASDAQ, NYNEX and who knows where else, as they are far in excess the required share price for those markets and I am sure we Slashdotters can create sufficient trade "volume" trading our super-shares via email 20 times a day.
All that remains is for the turkeys, known as the "institutional investors" so start biting! After all they gamble on equally reasonably "valued" and brain-dead "opportunities" such as the above mentioned FaceBook. Why should they care if we have no product, no sales, no assets? That never stopped them before, did it?! And we are on the Internet!
And so dear Slashdotters, I am hereby giving you your way to beeeeeelions of dollars (or euros) as easy as filling some paperwork and registering the name!
So here it goes:
Enron... WorldCom... Kozmo.com...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah, there is, but that domain is just a redirect to slashdot.org.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Facebook is a text-based RPG.
I think it has more to do with the fact that you have no friends. Although I'll admit that living under a rock would certainly play a part.